AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE UTILISATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA TO FOSTER TEAM COLLABORATION IN A HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced new challenges with subsequent opportunities to teach innovative ways of team collaboration. One example is the utilisation of social media to foster online team collaboration. This study investigates the use of Discord by students, a social media platform originally developed for online gamers, to collaborate virtually to complete project team tasks. The research question – what role a social media tool, namely Discord, plays in fostering team collaboration – was investigated using a qualitative, interpretative approach. Topic modeling identified ten themes, with the most vital theme indicating that students initially used Discord due to the academic requirement but later extensively used the platform because of its convenience and usefulness. Most students continued to use Discord even after completing their studies. While the main reason for adopting the tool was convenience due to peers using the platform, it became a logical and practical platform to communicate with friends, work on completing tasks together, and as a result, create a strong sense of belonging. © (2022) by Association for Information Systems (AIS) All rights reserved.

Vito Project: Subsea System Goes Back to Basics

In 2009, the Vito field was discovered in more than 4,000 ft of water approximately 150 miles offshore from New Orleans, Louisiana. The project produces from reservoirs nearly 30,000 feet below sea level. The project underwent major redesign to remain competitive, and this paper describes changes within the subsea system. This paper is part of a Vito Project series at OTC 2023, and the other papers are listed in the references. As the industry and market began to change in 2015, the project faced significant financial hurdles, and the project team decided to refresh the field development concept to reduce cost and simplify. This paper focuses on the subsea production system and some of the key decisions leading to the selected design and the approach the team used for making these decisions. It also discusses how the project execution model was established, and the modifications made during project execution to react to schedule challenges, the unprecedented impacts of COVID-19, and a tightening offshore market. © 2023, Offshore Technology Conference.

COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES IN DISTRIBUTED STUDENT PROJECTS

Student projects have been widely adopted in software engineering education. Project teams are composed of students in the same institution, and students can meet and communicate face-to-face regularly. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, forced the student projects to rapidly transition to remote mode and adapt to the virtual team. Virtual teams in distributed environments face challenges due to distance factors that separate collaborators from each other. This study aims at investigating the communication challenges student teams encountered and managed to overcome. We report on an analysis of data collected from reports and interviews in the software project course delivered in fall 2020. There were 57 participants, forming 10 project teams in the study. The results show that remote work negatively affects the social aspects of project teams, especially early communication difficulties in a project. The teams were able to handle most identified challenges but had less interest in tackling those that they did not see as a risk to project completion, which would have most likely caused problems in real-world projects. This study improves understanding of communication challenges in student project teams and the findings serve as a resource for course teachers to design student project courses in the context of virtual teams. © 2022 SEFI 2022 - 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.

Policy Making Based on Real-Scale Social Simulations

In this paper, we discuss decision-making processes for our communities using social simulation tools using some machine learning or artificial intelligence techniques. We take an example of considering preventive measures based on simulation results during COVID-19 pandemic. To avoid explosive infection in Japan, several preventive measures were considered. Among them, short-time business for restaurants, tourism support policies and vaccination schedules are included. I am involved in Covid-19 AI & Simulation Project Team (AISP) of Cabinet Secretariat, Japanese government. My contribution is to provide synthetic population data for real-scale social simulations for specific areas. In those simulations, we do not aim to predict a precise number of infected or severe patients by COVID-19 but to show several simulation results under various scenarios with different simulation parameters. After their simulation results are compared with each other, common outcomes are extracted from their results, and finally they are provided to the government. In that decision making process, their simulation results under several scenarios are shown to government officers, and final decision makings are left for politicians to decide. Since experts who are not elected are not able to take political responsibilities for their decision making, the AISP team shows several scenarios using their simulation models to support government officers and politicians to make their decisions. © 2022 IEEE.

Hands-on Project Based Learning Design Project to Accommodate Social Distancing and On-line Learners

With the outbreak of the pandemic, our School of Engineering spent summer 2020 reworking our classes so that our students could have comparable class experiences whether attending class in person or on-line. This presented a challenge on how to deliver a team centered hands-on design project in our sophomore level material and energy balance course. As part of this project, teams are required not only to research, design, construct, evaluate, test and report on their product, but also to develop a mathematical model to predict their product's performance. It is important that the students have a fun yet inexpensive project to design and build, but they must also develop a mathematical understanding of the fundamental engineering principles that make their design work. Through this mathematical modeling the student cultivates the connection between mathematics and science, as well as understanding the fundamental engineering principles that make their products work. This paper will describe the details of the design project, which includes the design criteria and constraints, how the students are introduced to the project through a professionally produced introductory video, and an introduction to the engineering design and decision-making process, while also teaching basic engineering concepts. Activities will be provided which helped to scaffold the underlying math and science concepts to support the design decisions. CATME was utilized in forming design teams - while balancing the teams by schedule, gender, race/ethnicity, GPA, and in-person/online. This allowed team members to participate equitably by developing the mathematical model (which was not restricted to the online students) and building and testing the product (in-person students with input from the online students) (while remaining socially distanced and testing outdoors) and all team members worked on the final design project report. Design testing videos and pictures will be included to illustrate the variety of successful design solutions - in addition, the list of design materials which were provided for the teams to select from for the construction of their design. The results of this project (fall 2020) will be compared to (fall 2021 - under a less restrictive COVID protocol) and pre-COVID (2002, 2008 and 2011) semesters - when this project was used in a first-year introduction to engineering design course. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022

Development of Safety Processes for Design and Manufacture of Small Liquid Propellant Engines and Launch Vehicles

The Cal Poly Pomona (CPP) Liquid Rocket Lab project teams in the 2020-2021 academic year further developed the planning of the engine injector water flow testing, oxygen compatibility and cleaning procedures and further advanced the Mobile Rocket Engine Test Stand piping and structural design. Failure Modes and Effects Analysis were also performed on the system elements to be able to target the critical components for failure mitigation design and procedure development. The CPP revised system for FMEAs is shown. These items were needed to be accomplished in order to perform an engine hot firing for the Bronco 1 Launch Vehicle. This paper describes briefing some the status of the CPP FAR-Mars competition progress and the vehicle systems manufacturing and assembly modifications related to safety developed during our program activity. Some of our testing objectives were postponed due to the COVID19 activity constraints. © 2021, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc.. All rights reserved.

Enhancing post-graduate education: from studentship to mentorship using project-based approach

This paper discusses post-graduate education strategy developed and applied through more than two decades of running the international student summer program organized and supported by the Bauman Moscow State Technical University. The uniqueness of the program is two-fold: for participating students it offers an experience to work in international teams on an intense and comprehensive space project in a short two-week program;for graduated BMTSU students it presents opportunities to learn team management, project development, and task distribution skills that they can apply in their professional life. A project’s theme is different every summer and graduated students participating as team leaders have to learn how to organize the research, distribute the tasks and lead data analysis and design development. During two weeks of intense work on all aspects of the project, team leaders are given responsibilities not only to assign research and engineering tasks within their teams but also to mentor and work on team-building relationships to ensure the effectiveness and productivity of each teammate. The longevity of the program allows us to trace the development of participating students, into project team leaders and mentors, then into successful space industry professionals and decision-makers. The paper presents results of such succession between generations of program participants, lessons learned, and evolution of projects and the program itself. The synergy of program organizers and alumni made it possible to conduct the program in summer 2020 in spite of the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants worked together across continents and time zones every day for 10 days straight to finish the project on time and present it to the jury that consisted of professionals, astronauts, and cosmonauts also from different continents and time zones. Copyright © 2021 by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF). All rights reserved.

How COVID-19 Impacted The Tacit Knowledge and Social Interaction of Global NPD Project Teams: The complexity framework offers managers an effective way to analyze problems and to generate solutions to manage tacit knowledge and social interaction in dispersed global NPD project teams

: Overview: Multinational, technology-intensive companies routinely use globally distributed R&D teams, but COVID-19 represented an additional challenge. Lockdowns and home-office working severely limit human interaction and can impact the communication, social interaction, and knowledge sharing critical to successful R&D. Our study investigated how COVID-19 affected R&D processes at three global companies, using a project complexity perspective. Although R&D managers responsible for global projects are accustomed to the challenges of managing communications, the fact that teams were forced into home-office working made new product development more difficult in several ways. Ensuring that technical details are understood by all members of dispersed teams is crucial. Of particular note, and central to our findings, is the emphasis that R&D managers placed on maintaining a high level of social interaction in their teams, and special efforts were needed to keep interactions at a sufficient level to foster the generation and transfer of tacit knowledge. The findings have strong implications for the way that R&D project management is likely to be conducted in a post-COVID-19 world, and we demonstrate how the complexity framework we used can benefit managers in navigating this and other challenges. © Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Offering Hands-on Manufacturing Workshops Through Distance Learning

This paper reports on how institutions collaborating on Additive Manufacturing (AM) and Smart Manufacturing (SM) have been able to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic and be able to modify their planned activities in 2020 in an effort to continue delivering quality training and education to educators across the country. The pandemic made it impossible to offer the usual on-ground workshops to STEM educators and industrial practitioners. As a workaround, the project teams offered instructional delivery via Zoom and Microsoft Teams while also providing distance learning tools online. The best practices of the delivery and pros/cons of the operations will be presented with the feedback received from the participants. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Analysis of a school to work transitions program for students with disabilities: A program evaluation of project team

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of implementing Project TEAM by examining its effects on school culture, teacher pedagogy, and program viability as measured by The CIPP Program Evaluation Model and The Program Evaluation Standards 2011. Project TEAM is a transition age occupational therapy based curriculum that promotes increased social and vocational participation in school, work, and community by teaching students how to overcome environmental barriers through the use of modifications and self-advocacy. This program was selected as a curricular supplement to the loss of community-based work internships due to the national and statewide closures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. This research study used a mixed methods approach to measure the impact and viability of the Project TEAM curriculum in a small, private high school for students with disabilities in central New Jersey. The study is significant because it takes the Project TEAM curriculum from its original use as a small group instructional model independent of school to a fully integrated school wide curriculum used by classroom teachers, vocational teachers, therapists, and school counselors. The researcher in the study used the CIPP evaluation model to guide the research to ensure that all stakeholders were involved in the evaluation process. A quasi-experimental approach was used by performing pre- and post-intervention measurements. The findings from this research study highlighted the importance of addressing school culture and teacher pedagogy prior to beginning a new curriculum model, especially one such as Project TEAM that has such a strong therapeutic component which was used in this study in an interdisciplinary manner. The study is also significant due to the need to help transition-age youth with disabilities to close the gap in competitive employment post-secondary schooling. Project TEAM showed promise in promoting those transition skills that students would need to close the school to work transitions gap. The school appeared to benefit from implementing Project TEAM, but further adaptation and research could help other schools and students benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to providing sorely needed transition programming for students with disabilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)